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Reverberations of China's One Child PolicyChina’s birthrate is falling. But beyond what Beijing sees as a demographics crisis, the country’s steeply declining population points to serious policy failures and an absence of human rights considerations. Perhaps more importantly, the trend also highlights many women’s unwillingness to conform to the country’s repressive reproductive policies. Government-Driven Crisis Much of the country’s birthrate dilemma results from the Chinese government’s disastrous “One Child” policy, which for three decades limited the number of children a family could have and compounded the natural decline in China’s fertility rate amid an aging population, writes Maya Wang, Human Rights Watch’s Interim China Director, for the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief. After hopelessly shifting to “Two Child” and even “Three Child” regulations to try and jumpstart population growth, the government pivoted in 2021 to a policy of flat-out encouraging births. Authorities looked to the countryside, where families traditionally have had more children, and adopted what it called “supportive reproductive measures.” But rural women are also having fewer children. Women cite the cost of raising children, both in terms of time and financial resources, as a reason to have smaller families. Gender Imbalance Women born in the 1980s and 1990s may have experienced the dramatic magnification of the traditional preference for sons over daughters – another hangover from the One Child policy. They may have formed negative opinions of marriage, as some women grew up witnessing their mothers be subjected to forced abortions or saw their sisters being given away so their parents could try again for a boy. Millions of girls are estimated to have been abandoned or gone missing. The skewed ratio of men to women has another dark side. Women and girls trafficked from nearby countries have been sold as “brides” to Chinese families and placed in horrific situations. Taking Back Control Yet the gender imbalance has led to other dynamics as well. As families seek Chinese brides, many women have obtained greater voice and control in family decision-making – including over giving birth. And some government measures to boost the birthrate have been positive and even helpful for families, like providing more maternity leave, housing and tax benefits, and cash handouts. However, “for this generation of women,” writes HRW’s Maya Wang, “many are unwilling to turn their bodies on and off depending on the needs of the state. The government’s pivot from a coercive to a supportive model of birth control has thus come too little, too late.” |
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